Monitoring events in Balochistan, CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor), China's Belt and Road Initiative and it's economic and strategic implications, Pakistan Military operations and ongoing Baloch struggle.News and Reports are collected from open sources to raise awareness among scholars, researchers and public in general.

Western fears about Chinese dominance of technologies have recently focused on artificial intelligence (AI). Yet there are many other industries where China is set to lead, partly because of the sheer numbers of talented and educated people available and entrepreneurial zeal, but also because of government support and light regulation.

Biotech — pharma, healthcare, and medical devices — is one such area. Another is industrial agriculture — from the development of new crops and fertilizers to operating large-scale farms. Electric cars and the batteries that power them are one more space where China is already a dominant player. Today brings news from each of these three industries:

Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics is a medical hardware company that makes everything from ultrasound machines to operating tables for surgery. Caixin reports(paywall) that Mindray has “filed to raise more than 6 billion yuan ($935 million) through a listing on China’s Nasdaq-style ChiNext board.”Longping High-Tech Agriculture is named after Yuan Longping 袁隆平, inventor of the world’s first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s. Last year, the state-controlled company bought DowDuPont’s Brazilian corn seed operations for $1.1 billion. Reuters reports that Longping this week announced plans to build new seed plants in Brazil to boost its market share from “15 percent currently to 30 percent in five years,” and “said a natural second step will be to enter the soy seeds business, which is dominated by U.S.-based Monsanto Inc.”Tianqi Lithium is a company founded in 1995 in Sichuan Province. Quartz reports that Tianqi “recently paid more than $4 billion to become the second-largest shareholder in Sociedad Química y Minera (SQM), a Chilean mining company.” The deal means that Tianqi now controls more than half of the current global production of lithium. Lithium is the key ingredient in almost all of the world’s smartphone and electric-car batteries.

2. Visa restrictions and the Chinese Exclusion Act

The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration “plans to shorten the length of validity for some visas issued to Chinese citizens” as part of a campaign “to counter alleged theft of U.S. intellectual property by Beijing.”

“Chinese graduate students will be limited to one-year visas if they are studying in fields like robotics, aviation and high-tech manufacturing,” according to an unnamed U.S. official.Those areas are priorities in the government’s Made in China 2025 manufacturing plan.On the subject of keeping Chinese people out of America, The Chinese Exclusion Act, a documentary film about the 1882 law that made it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America and for Chinese nationals to become U.S. citizens, is now available free online. It’s really worth your time.

Mattis also “recalled Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2015 pledge not to militarize” disputed South China Sea islands, and said, “We have seen in the last month, they have done exactly that, moving weaponry in that was never there before.” Mattis’s remarks come after multiple confrontations between Beijing and other countries:

In April, China sent ships and aircraftto confront three Australian naval vessels headed for Vietnamese ports, the New York Times reports (paywall).Beijing also sent ships to confrontU.S. vessels conducting “freedom of navigation operations” within 12 miles of the Chinese-claimed Paracel Islands, the Times says. This action prompted Washington to withdraw its invitation to China to participate in Rimpac, a biennial joint military exercise.A Chinese H-6K bomber landed on Woody Island in the Paracels earlier this month, at the same time that missiles and radar equipment were sent to other islands in the region, according to the Wall Street Journal(paywall).On May 11, a Chinese helicopter flew “dangerously close” to a Philippine naval vessel that was delivering supplies to Filipino Marines in contested territory, the Associated Press reports.

The United States claims that it has a right to conduct “freedom of navigation operations” under international law. Mattis underscored that, although the United States is conducting these operations, the U.S. is not their sole beneficiary, stating, “A lot of nations want to see freedom of navigation. So we will continue that.”

—Lucy Best

4. Trade war update: ‘An unfortunate sound bite’

Peter “Death by China” Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council, talked to NPR this morning. He remains unabashed in his China-bashing, although he calls his mission a "trade dispute," not a “trade war.” The trade war, he says, was lost a long time ago by former presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton.

“They run up a $370 billion trade surplus with us,which costs us over a million in factory jobs a year” is still the core of Navarro’s argument."That was an unfortunate sound bite," said Navarro of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s comment last week that the trade war with China was "on hold," because it’s not a war and it’s not on hold.Navarro refused to answer questionsabout the Trump family receiving favors from the Chinese government such as trademarks, and he refused to comment on Trump’s apparent caving in to China on ZTE, saying that it was a “law enforcement matter.”

Latest trade war twist: China will cut import tariffs “on a range of consumer items, including apparel, cosmetics, home appliances, and fitness products, starting from July 1,” reports Reuters. On the other hand, Reuters also notes that “China’s state media has lashed into a U.S. announcement that it would press ahead with restrictions on investment by Chinese companies, saying Beijing was ready to fight back if Washington was looking to ignite a trade war.”

Comrade’s Voice (同志之声 tóngzhì zhīshēng) is a Weibo account dedicated to empowering the LGBT community in China — “comrade” is Chinese slang for “gay.”Today, the account posted a photo of a digital billboard (in Chinese) at the Xiangtan school displaying the following message: “Say no to homosexuality, create a bright and harmonious campus.”“The failure of sex education and backward ideas have resulted in the long-standing violence and discrimination against the gay community on campus,” Comrade’s Voice commented (in Chinese).Many internet users pointed out that the school’s hostility against homosexuality is at odds with the Chinese government’s stance, given that the People’s Daily argued in an April commentary that “homosexuality is not a mental illness.”

Based on the Chinese government’s own data on coal, oil, and natural gas demand, as well as cement production, Greenpeace researchers concluded that “China’s CO2 emissions went up 4.0% on the first quarter, after a 2% increase in 2017.” The authors write:

“If China’s emissions are indeed going back to rapid growth, it means that the rest of the world would have to run just to stay in place — keep global emissions from increasing. The task of achieving a rapid and sustained decline in global emissions would become essentially impossible.”

Tycoons in trouble: Wu Xiaohui Tycoon in China fights fraud verdict,but odds are long / NYT (paywall)
A lawyer representing Wu Xiaohui 吴小晖, former head of Anbang, the gray rhino company that bought the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, said Wu “would appeal a lengthy prison sentence for bilking investors.”Drone deliveryEle.me starts using drones to cut delivery costs and time / TechNode
“There are 17 routes in total, all located in Jinshan Industrial Park in the Shanghai suburbs. With three to four flights on each route, these drones connect around 100 food vendors.”Big Brother’s helpers — has a Chinese company hacked the iPhone?At Beijing security fair, an arms race for surveillance tech / Reuters
“Beijing-based Hisign Technology said its desktop and portable phone scanners can retrieve even deleted data from over 90 mobile applications on smartphones, including overseas platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A big selling point of the technology, according to one policeman from the restive far western region of Xinjiang who was eyeing a Hisign scanner, was its claimed ability to get data from Apple Inc’s iOS operating system.”Skiing in Hebei China's Hebei Province targets $23 billion 'ice and snow' industry by 2025/ Reuters
“Smog-prone” Hebei is building winter sports and tourism facilities for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games and in the hope of finding “sustainable sources of economic growth to reduce its dependence on polluting heavy industries like steel and chemicals.”Xi Jinping jumps on the blockchain bandwagonChinese President Xi Jinping calls blockchain a 'breakthrough' technology / CNBC
"A new generation of technology represented by artificial intelligence, quantum information, mobile communications, internet of things and blockchain is accelerating breakthrough applications," said Xi.World Cup dreamsChina won’t play in this World Cup. It still hopes to profit. / NYT (paywall)
“The tournament host, Russia, and the sport’s governing body, FIFA, are beset by scandals and controversies that have cast a shadow over the event — and made it a struggle to attract corporate sponsors.” As traditional sponsors pull out, they leave a void China is happy to fill.

The Newspaper's Staff CorrespondentOctober 25, 2017QUETTA: The provincial cabinet on Tuesday approved the draft for establishing a medical university in Balochistan.Health minister Mir Rehmat Saleh Baloch made the announcement while speaking at a press conference after a cabinet meeting.“The cabinet has approved the draft of the medical university which would be presented in the current session of the Balochistan Assembly,” he said, adding with the assembly’s approval the Bolan Medical College would be converted into a medical university.Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2017

The Rise of China-Europe RailwaysMarch 6, 2018The Dawn of a New Commercial Era?For over two millennia, technology and politics have shaped trade across the Eurasian supercontinent. The compass and domesticated camels helped the “silk routes” emerge between 200 and 400 CE, and peaceful interactions between the Han and Hellenic empires allowed overland trade to flourish. A major shift occurred in the late fifteenth century, when the invention of large ocean-going vessels and new navigation methods made maritime trade more competitive. Mercantilism and competition among Europe’s colonial powers helped pull commerce to the coastlines. Since then, commerce between Asia and Europe has traveled primarily by sea.1Against this historical backdrop, new railway services between China and Europe have emerged rapidly. Just 10 years ago, regular direct freight services from China to Europe did not exist.2 Today, they connect roughly 35 Chinese…